Dear Luis
Thank you once more for a thoughtful reply. I enjoy reading your very different take on these matters. I think it helps to broaden my understanding of events since, naturally, we are all a bit biased and I am most definitely biased
against Carter (lets just say that I'm not a groupie
), which obviously influences how I interpret his actions.
I have trouble believing that. It is far easier to believe that CIA is not well-suited to gauging levels of popular revolt and communicating them (having been involved in creating that very situation and all) than that Khomeini's acceptance and influence rised unpredictably and suddenly. There were far too many people in Iran, and the revolt was much too open and too popular, for me to believe that it couldn't be expected by those who dared to accept it as a possibility.
Good point. I think that the reason
why the CIA did not anticipate the Iranian Revolution - and I kid you not they genuinely didn't see it coming, as unbelievable as that might seem to us with the benefit of hindsight - was because they were suffering from some major
hubris. The CIA had practically overthrown Muhammad Reza Pahlavi's father Reza Pahlavi and put the son on the peacock throne. They did not for a minute expect that a regime they had effectively created to counter the feared Communist sympathies of the socialist leader Mossadegh, would collapse because of a rag-tag popular revolt by ordinary Iranians, including fervent students, and with hardly any blood spilt. The CIA just did not see it coming and neither did other analysts, because it was genuinely assumed that the USA would never let its most important Middle East ally fall. The Soviets had Saddam and the Americans had the Shah. Most people couldn't envision anything else.
Agreed. I wish I weren't so young at the time, so that I had a more informed notion of the political climate.
Well, I wasn't born back then. I was born in 1992
My understanding of it comes from studying the 1970s in the context of the Cold War.
All the same, I'm not certain it makes a lot of sense to even talk about a "hold" on whole countries. Or that it is a desirable goal for one to have if it is even possible.
Agreed. I was speaking of the Shah's hold on Iran, however. His dictatorship was considered to be stable since there had not been great protests at all before the sudden onslaught of the Islamic Revolution of '79. In hindsight, it should have been known that the
over-Westernization of Iran under the Pahlavis and the
de-Islamization, welded to an ever-widening rich/poor disparity and the lack of political freedoms (despite great social freedom if you were upper-middle class or upper class) and the fact that Iran was the first country in the Islamic world to have a parliament in 1906 after a Persian Constitutional Revolution, would lead to some kind of revolutionary situation. Iranians were like the French of the Middle East - revolt against tyranny was built into the fabric of their Shi'ite faith. One of the key events in Shi'ite history was the Battle of Karbala where Husayn was murdered standing up to the Caliph Yazid. The Shah was identified by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 60s as a modern day
Yazid. People should have realized back then that if given the right time, this could galvanize popular revolt (ironically in 2009, the Iranian protestors branded Ayatollah Khameini as the new
Yazid. Iranians are dissatisfied again with the abuses of the current government).
No doubt there were conflicting interests at stake on that matter, as in so many others. I still feel that you are overestimating the amount of influence that a POTUS can legitimally (and usefully) exert over a foreign country that has a very different culture.
I'm not so sure. The whole point of being a superpower, surely, is the ability to influence other nations. The entire Cold War was premised on the notion of the two superpowers using other, smaller countries to fight each other by proxy and expand their competing ideologies (Marxism vs liberal capitalist democracy). The Soviet Union had their Iron Curtain behind which lay their client states, the Soviet Bloc - nominally "independent" but in reality under the direct command of the Soviets, as poor Czechoslovakia learned in 1968 when it tried to have a "Prague Spring", bringing in liberalizing social freedoms. Under the terms of the Warsaw Pact the Soviet Union invaded the country and overthrew the government.
While America, as a democracy, did not aspire to do this as we all know its inevitable superpower status led it in to doing something similar in North Vietnam under the dictator President Diem, in Nicaragua and so forth up to the present.
Its one of the sad side-effects of maintaining "superpower" status. Its what turned ancient Rome from a republic into an empire through an endless series of foreign wars.
For that matter, I also wonder how useful a buffer Iran could ever have been, even taking aside the ethical considerations. For all I know Jimmy Carter aimed for a peaceful transition towards a Muslim government, realizing that the continuation of Pahlavi's role was untennable in more senses than one. And he would have pulled it off if previous history did not give him very unfavorable circunstances. He arguably did succeed, even.
From 1976-1979, given the intel from the CIA, Carter would have been completely unaware that Iran would move towards becoming an Islamic theocracy. Do not forget that most ordinary Iranians did not think they would be living in a theocracy. Khomeini promised them the heavens. He said that women would have their rights protected and dress as they pleased, minorities would be protected, their would be representative government etc. so long as the US was kicked out and the Zionists were attacked. He was of course lying and he only said such things to his own people, however the people believed him. Hence why the Communists - the Tudeh party of Iran - helped his Islamist rebels overthrow the Shah in the mistaken belief that after the Revolution the Ayatollah would retire to Qom and live peacefully as a retired mullah. Khomeini had promised his people and the Marxists that the clerics would have no power in Iran. In fact he turned the country into an Islamic theocracy.
So I do not think that Carter had any notion that Iran would become a Muslim state until the Ayatollah made plain his intentions to create the system of
vilayat i faqih (rule of the Islamic jurists) when he got off that air France jet in 1979.
When he did announce this, Carter suddenly thought - and told his aides - that an Islamic state would be a good buffer against the Soviet. So instead of imposing sanctions or hard verbal protestations as he did against the Soviet Union, Carter thought he could bribe the new government into becoming America's next ally and buffer.
He received an answer with the Iranian hostage crisis and that was the death of Carter. He was unelectable after that, when the crisis lasted from 1979-1981 - over a year of terror for the hostages and their families.
In the sense that it wouldn't submit to Sovietic influence, would that be innacurate?
Yes. Carter considered the Mujahdeen and other Islamist groups fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He thought that because these groups went into a provisional, short-time kind of quasi-alliance with the US against the Soviets, that Iran would follow suit. Khomeini, being a religious man, was against atheism after all.
He seemed not to realize that Khomeini considered America and Israel to be the two Satans, with Soviet Russia a far more distant third. It was the West that Khomeini believed to be the greatest evil. He understood that communism in Russia and the Soviet bloc would not last forever and had a sell-by date. It was the West, with its alluring materialism and (as he saw it) immoral lifestyle, liberal tolerance of homosexuality, women's equality and religious freedom, that represented the truly satanic power - one that would long outlast Communism and constitute the single greatest bulwark against his brand of fanatical Islam.
The Soviet Union was beginning its long road of decline, while Carter's miscalculation left the world with an Islamist state fanatically opposed to the West and Israel. Iran become the world's greatest state sponsor of terror.
The Iranian Revolution did not have to end with an Islamic state. It was a democratic-Islamist-Marxist revolution at first. The fact that the Islamists won through in the end and formed an Islamic Republic need not have occurred.
The first Prime Minister of the provisional republic was a liberal socialist.
Had proper support been given to him and the more liberal forces, Khomeini might not have been able to form his totalitarian religious state.
Carter miscalculated that Khomeini would be a man he could do business with.
